another revolution around the sun
today I turn twenty five
I have barely written anything about Sfax. In truth, Sfax is my real hometown, not Nabeul. It is the city where my father and all of my grandparents were born. It is also where my siblings and I were born, in the same hospital, under the care of the same gynecologist. I was born in Sfax, it is my place of origin but not necessarily a pole of return.
“Lately, I have been theorizing on the difference between a pole of return and a pole of origin, to go as so far to think that the places where we trace our lineage may not always be the place where we feel that very wrenching feeling of departure and yearning. A pole of return inspires not only the past but the future. It is about those very dreams that we leave in particular geographies, knowing we can retrieve them at a later date. For that reason, Sfax is not my pole of return, I do not recover my dreams in my ancestral city, but rather, uncover the mythologies of my origins. Mythology is robust and stagnant in time. It is part of the stories we tell ourselves to remember a past that is greater than us, and that we may have not experienced. If a pole of origin is a Roman history museum, then on its contrary, a pole of return is a national history museum. One is filled with the ruins and statues of a past subject to excavation, stories subject to little to no reinterpretation, whilst the other, shapes narratives to answer the questions of who we are, who we were, and who we will be. A pole of return is play dough you mold with your bare hands. It changes through time, partially informed by the conditions of your return, and who you have become since the last time you were around. You change ever so slightly, which means that every time you return, the meaning of the poles of return inevitably change. When we return, we require different things from them. A pole of return is a place that can conform to the changes you require to make your return palatable A pole of origin will not adapt to your needs. You could rewrite mythologies, but that endeavor is futile for the most part. When I am in Sfax, I learn about the vestiges of memories of our extended families, particularly the elders. I find myself in old houses on wooden bench couches and in between fields of olive and almond trees, that no longer yield as much fruit due to drought.”
My family moved to Nigeria in the winter of 1999 and returned to Tunisia in February and a few days later, I was born. I was my mother’s first C-section and the smallest baby she bore. There was no incubator in the hospital that night, so the doctors wrapped me in aluminum foil to keep me warm. It was not quite a plain sheet of aluminum foil as originally described to me, but rather those aluminum foil blankets used to treat hypothermia. I was described as a big sandwich. On each of my birthdays, my parents remind me of how when I was born they were worried that there was something wrong with me because of my size, and how the doctor said “Don’t worry, she will turn out just fine”. I don’t know what the doctor’s words meant, my parents think it means something, a prophecy of some sort, that my parents recount every year after I blow my birthday cake candles.
My first departure from Tunisia was at 21 days old, once I was issued a passport. After two weeks in Sfax, my family went to the North East, where I spent my first week in Nabeul. Mama Rachida recalls this story every time I leave the country from her house when I give her the last six or so hugs and kisses of my visit. She remembers the day that my parents, sister, and I traveled to Nigeria. That afternoon, Mama Rachida was crying uncontrollably in her house, her friend unexpectedly died the previous day and she was worried I would not survive the trip to Nigeria.
“Don’t take her, she will die” Mama Rachida said.
I must have been the first baby on both sides of the family to have traveled that early in life. We must have had a layover in Paris, and once we reached Lagos in the afternoon, the traffic lasted hours. The windows were rolled down, and my parents worried I would suffocate from the fumes of gasoline. But I made it to our house.
My origin story, which ends with my safe arrival in Nigeria, was all about survival. It was about miracles. The miracles of a small newborn making it through travels, that I suspect are subject to the embellished exaggerations of my relatives. My family was worried during the first month of my life, that I would not survive, even though I had no major health issues. I do not know to what extent their fears were justified. But that is the story that was the mythology and the foundational story of my life, that they told for years. And for years I loved the myth of my survival, even though the odds were probably favorable for me. My survival gave me a sense of resilience that I needed to have, one that I needed to believe existed within me.
My birthday elicits a strong emotional response since it still reminds me of these narratives of survival I am trying to overwrite. My teenage years were filled with what felt like the emotional baggage of a lifetime. At times, I try to understand what made the world so dark, where the depth of my unhappiness comes from, and why/how its specters still haunt me as an adult. I spiraled for a few years. The future was not an abstraction but a foreign concept to me. I did not imagine one. I roam the earth still. Every day I am a witness to the wretched beauty of living, and that is the most hopeful thing I have come across.
My birth story is no longer about survival. I am resisting indulging the mythologies of my survival, and instead, nosedive into impermanence. I was born into transience and have remained that way since. My liminal present is the innovation of my mythology, informed by my bifurcated existence between Nabeul, Abu Dhabi, and Oxford.
In the weeks leading up to my quarter of a century on this earth, I was (and continue) thinking about home. The temporary homes I create while I am away from home, and those that I rekindle when I return. Heidegger’s concept of dwelling helps me better understand how I interact with space. He argues that dwelling is not just about having a physical shelter but a deeper way of being in the world. Dwelling, for Heidegger, means existing meaningfully in a space, forming a relationship with it that goes beyond mere habitation.
I thought I was writing about home [my grandparent’s house] to try to preserve it, but only now have I realized it came out of a desire to inscribe myself onto a place, knowing that my existence as it is right now, will never have a place inseparable from me, like my late grandfather to his house, among other examples. It was my way of dwelling, forming a relationship with a place that feels tangible.
For a place to become home we must appropriate it as our own, infusing it with value through the processes of inhabitation, cultivation and the accumulation of memory. To call a place home means that it is no longer separate from us, but knitted to the fabric of our being. Home, in other words, involves our participation in place. The word appropriation comes from the Latin appropriare – ‘to make one’s own’ (Dovey, 1985: 11). For Heidegger, ‘appropriation is a dialectic process through which we take aspects of our world into our being and are in turn taken by our world’ (Dovey, 1985: 11).
Paul O’Connor “The Cultivation of Place” in Home: The Foundation of Belonging (2008)
But why else do I yearn for a place that feels my absence? Absorbed by my body’s ability to move through geographies and temporalities, I could not help but wonder if I ever found a tether to the place, if that tether would bloom into boredom or restlessness. Nothing is more familiar to me than packing suitcases and boxes, train or bus or car rides to the airport, hellos, goodbyes, being far away from the people I love. The motions blur into one another. My body knows the weight of transit, a suitcase too heavy, goodbyes that make my body ache, never quite going away. Exhaustion clings to my skin. I wear it quietly, it stretches thinner with each return and departure.
My homeland barely knew me, even at birth, and the places I inhabited that have followed barely remember me, and I barely remember them too. I resent how much the present impacts my reading of the past. I am susceptible to anachronism. I resent that I constantly try to remember each of my revolutions around the sun. I am a hoarder of memories yet I continue to forget. I resent that the fragmentation of my mind haunts me, stuck between myths of the past and fabrications of the present. I am still learning how to imagine a future.
Usually, before sending you anything, I let my words steep. Enough until I can taste the bitterness of what weighs heavily on my heart. Enough but it still is incomplete. Everything in this project is not quite close to completion, so I can one day return to my words. This essay has been a year in the making. I never sent the draft on my 24th birthday. But rereading it reveals how much and how little has changed in the last year. I have added so much to it in the past month.
We were studying the Arab Uprisings of 2011 in class yesterday [February 2024]. Someone asked “How do we know when revolutions end, and where do they start?” and the only answer I could provide, is that revolutions end when the collective imaginary of a transformed future no longer exists. I do not know if I still agree with that statement, but in that logic, I revolve around the sun, but my revolution has not begun.
I find that there is a cyclical sadness that overtakes me on my birthday. One that may be the result of the collision of nostalgia (memory/imagination) and the future. Each birthday is a liminal moment between nostalgia and anticipation for what has yet to arrive. Similarly to other calendar dates, such as New Year’s, which brings about a feeling of obligation to force us to shed off the inertia of the past. It is not only an archive of who we have become, but a speculative moment to reorient and reimagine possibilities, and we could do that any time of the year. Today, my nostalgia and the future collide. It does so every day, but more so now, as I complete and commence a new revolution around the sun.
Svetlana Boym differentiates two types of tendencies of nostalgia, under which longing takes shape and constitutes different meanings. Restorative nostalgia emphasises nostos, and endeavors to rebuild the lost home and recover memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia “dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance [...] lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time”. It is within the framework of reflective nostalgia that I orient myself, as my experience of nostalgia is aware of the distance that separates me from home, which is not only geographic but temporal.
Svetlana Boym further writes in the Future of Nostalgia (2002) that « The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as a foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development. We don't need a computer to get access to the virtualities of our imagination: reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness. »
I have attempted to recover my dreams of a different time and a different place. I have been thinking about my parents and grandparent’s dreams, and how some of them have been transmitted to me. Affective memories are actually what orient us in a modern world that constantly changes. Nostalgia has never been solely a rosy-colored lens in which I view the world. It has become how I oriente and reoriente in the face of a home lost in time.
Dwelling is closely associated with nostalgia as it involves time, memory, and continuity. A place is not just a location, but a layered experience, shaped by past interactions, anticipations, dreams, and aspirations for the future. But haven’t I already told you about how each visit to my grandparent’s house tastes of dreams embedded within its walls? Similarly to that, all cities are born from memories.
Sara Ahmed argues that home is meant to be a space that aligns with our past experiences, that is how our movement comes to feel natural. But when a space disorients us, we become aware of our displacement in the space, making us question our bodies. Return and departure will always bring about temporal or spatial dislocation, as our absence leads to inevitable change. That means, movement to home, will always require a reorientation. And to reorient, we return to our memories, the mythologies and dreams of a different time.
On some days, I miss myself. I miss the body, my body, that was always meant to be my first home. A body that feels segmented between geographies, that does not quite feel connected to my mind these days. My body and I were supposed to be my home. But my body feels unknown. I then sought refuge in the past, in what has happened and what I chose to remember. Only that endeavor has permanently altered the way I experience time. I feel like I am halfway through my exploration of nostalgia, everything now hints towards the future. The very future I struggled to imagine.
“Talk to your plant, wipe her leaves, it will make you feel much better… Yesmine your future is bright” my mom told me on the phone.
But it was never a future I wanted to imagine or was able to do so. In a series of accidental events, I am fulfilling my teenage hood dreams. I am fulfilling my mother and grandmother’s dreams.
But how is the future something I chase and avoid simultaneously? I wonder then if I am torn between past and present, when will my body feel like mine? So I can finally live in the present.
I wish I wrote to you with more optimism or more hopefulness for the future, and I wish that my fingers reached for my keyboard on better days too. But on some days, it feels like the future has left me behind. Stuck between the crevices of what should have been, or dreams unfulfilled, deferred, or forgotten. I am starting to think that it is partially my fault, that I feel that way, at times, I leave the future behind too. I could imagine it, treat it as malleable matter, and let the past fold into my memories, leaving space for what is to come.
Earlier this month, when my body gave in, requiring rest in consecutive weeks of burnout, I no longer replayed memories in my mind, but the future. The future that has yet to arrive, feels like a collection of memories that cluster together into different possibilities. Futures capes clash in my mind. They remind us of all that it is possible and impossible. They remind me of the beauty of this world and the curses of living.
I lay in bed and imagined tomorrow to feel like myself again. Something I never thought I would be able to do. Since nostalgia is a bridge between memory and imagination, it means I am meant to walk it. I am neither fully anchored in the past, in the present, or in the future. Today is my birthday. I survived another revolution around the sun, another chance to reimagine what remains unfinished. I do not quite yet know how to write an ending, only how to keep moving.
Somewhere between all these returns and departures, I wonder - have I ever truly arrived anywhere in the past quarter of a century?
Regardless of my search for a place that feels my absence, a place to fit my future, a place where I can recover my dreams, my heart is full. I am going to bed thinking about beauty. About all those fleeting familiar feelings that tether me. I am thinking of the people that have made me feel love. I think of those who have taught me about love. I am thinking about family and friendship.
They say to be loved is to be changed. I am changed, and I am changed for the better. I have gained the joy of connecting, sharing, and imagining. You have made me realize the true value of friendship. Uplifting, compassionate, nurturing, and loving. You are all part of a present that I will one day be nostalgic for. And I am so grateful for all of you, to be part of my revolution. Similarly, it is my pleasure and honor to be in your orbit.
For my birthday, I ask that you make a donation. As I write and reflect on home, in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and Yemen, people experience dispossession, displacement, and genocide. Their struggles are urgent, and if you are able, please consider supporting trusted organizations providing aid and relief in these regions (and beyond). Even the smallest contribution can make a difference.
Thank you for reading, and for being here.
I loved reading this - what a beautifully reflective piece. Happy birthday, habibi.